Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan
Katha,
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StumbleUponIt's worse than you think. When I was at Oxford, during the height of the Cold War, I threw a champagne party to celebrate the arrival of Pershing missiles. In retrospect, surely, I was right. Seven years later, thanks in part to those missiles, half of Eastern Europe was having a champagne party. And the NRA analogy doesn't work. The point about nukes is that, unlike guns, it's impossible to think you can get ahead by using them. They're unique in that sense in the history of weaponry. Which is why I never understood Reagan's desire to see the end of them. We didn't need a peace-shield with them. They were our peace-shield. And still are. Of course, they might encourage us to engage in proxy, piddling conventional wars instead; but, however unfortunate that may be, it's more fortunate than a major power conflict.
Changing the subject a little, ahem, I see that the Christian Coalition candidate for Nebraska governor, whom the New York Times ran a piece on last Saturday, got creamed in the primary by the moderate, whom the Times dismissed as an unlikely victor. Apparently Nebraska's Republican voters deserted the rightist after he said he'd never hire a homosexual on his staff, and boasted that his beauty queen fianc,e was "saving herself" for marriage. I like to notice these small victories because I think it shows the GOP isn't beyond rescue; and that the heartland can rise above petty discrimination. Meanwhile, in Alaska, they just voted to have a referendum on whether to write an anti-gay marriage plank into the state constitution. D'Oh!
Win some; lose some.
best
Andrew
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